The 1561 celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg was a mass sighting of celestial phenomena or unidentified flying objects (UFO) above Nuremberg, Germany. The phenomenon has been interpreted by some modern UFO enthusiasts as an aerial battle of extraterrestrial origin.

Researchers have found evidence of an existing body of liquid water on Mars.

What they believe to be a lake sits under the planet's south polar ice cap, and is about 20 km (12 miles) across.

Previous research found possible signs of intermittent liquid water flowing on the martian surface, but this is the first sign of a persistent body of water on the planet in the present day.

Lake beds like those explored by Nasa's Curiosity rover show water was present on the surface of Mars in the past.

However, the planet's climate has since cooled due to its thin atmosphere, leaving most of its water locked up in ice.

The result is exciting because scientists have long searched for signs of present-day liquid water on Mars, but these have come up empty or yielded ambiguous findings. It will also interest those studying the possibilities for life beyond Earth - though it does not yet raise the stakes in the search for biology.

The discovery was made using Marsis, a radar instrument on board the European Space Agency's (Esa) Mars Express orbiter.

The proposed lake sits beneath ice near the south pole of Mars

"It's probably not a very large lake," said Prof Roberto Orosei from the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, who led the study.

Marsis wasn't able to determine how thick the layer of water might be, but the research team estimate that it is a minimum of one metre.

"This really qualifies this as a body of water. A lake, not some kind of meltwater filling some space between rock and ice, as happens in certain glaciers on Earth," Prof Orosei added.

How was it found?

Radar instruments like Marsis examine the surface and immediate subsurface of the planet by sending out a signal and examining what is bounced back.

The continuous white line at the top of the radar results above marks the beginning of the South Polar Layered Deposit; a filo pastry-like accumulation of water ice and dust.

"In light blue you can see where the reflections from the bottom are stronger than surface reflection. This is something that is to us the tell tale sign of the presence of water," says Prof Orosei.

What does this mean for life?

Nothing definitive. Yet.

Dr Manish Patel from the Open University explained: "We have long since known that the surface of Mars is inhospitable to life as we know it, so the search for life on Mars is now in the subsurface.

"This is where we get sufficient protection from harmful radiation, and the pressure and temperature rise to more favourable levels. Most importantly, this allows liquid water, essential for life."

This principle of following the water is key to astrobiology - the study of potential life beyond Earth.

So while the findings suggest water is present, they don't confirm anything further.

"We are not closer to actually detecting life," Dr Patel told BBC News, "but what this finding does is give us the location of where to look on Mars. It is like a treasure map - except in this case, there will be lots of 'X's marking the spots."

The water's temperature and chemistry could also pose a problem for any potential martian organisms.

In order to remain liquid in such cold conditions (the research team estimate between -10 and -30 Celsius where it meets the ice above), the water likely has a great many salts dissolved in it.

"It's plausible that the water may be an extremely cold, concentrated brine, which would be pretty challenging for life," explained Dr Claire Cousins, an astrobiologist from the University of St Andrews, UK.What next?

While its existence provides a tantalising prospect for those interested in the possibility of past or present life on Mars, the lake's characteristics must first be verified by further research.

"What needs to be done now," explained Dr Matt Balme from the Open University, "is for the measurements to be repeated elsewhere to look for similar signals, and, if possible, for all other explanation to be examined and - hopefully - ruled out.

"Maybe this could even be the trigger for an ambitious new Mars mission to drill into this buried water-pocket - like has been done for sub-glacial lakes in Antarctica on Earth," he added.

Scientists have previously claimed to find bacterial life in the buried depths of Antarctica's Lake Vostok, but drilling on Mars would make for an ambitious project indeed.

"Getting there and acquiring the final evidence that this is indeed a lake will not be an easy task," said Prof Orosei.

"It will require flying a robot there which is capable of drilling through 1.5km of ice. This will certainly require some technological developments that at the moment are not available."

Our first confirmed interstellar visitor was a tough nut to crack. Scientists puzzled over ‘Oumuamua when it appeared in the sky last year. The classification flipped back and forth a few times before eventually landing on “comet,” but it’s a weird comet. Now, researchers from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have revived the idea that ‘Oumuamua could be an alien spacecraft.

While we’ve recategorized ‘Oumuamua a few times, we can say with utmost certainty that it came from another solar system. It has an orbital eccentricity of 1.20, which is far past the sun’s escape velocity. Nothing in the solar system could reach that speed naturally without a cataclysmic release of energy that we would have noticed.

‘Oumuamua was already on its way out of the solar system and moving at high speed when we spotted it, so there was no time to build and launch a mission to intercept it. We haven’t even gotten a very good look at the object. Scientists believe ‘Oumuamua is cigar-shaped and up to 120 meters in length. That’s an unusual shape for an asteroid (at least in this solar system) so the discoverers initially categorized it as a comet. Then, scientists looked closer and saw no coma, the cloud of dust and gas that surround a comet when it nears the sun. So, an asteroid? Upon even closer examination, researchers found ‘Oumuamua’s orbit was being nudged by a force consistent with gas release. Currently, ‘Oumuamua is considered a low-activity comet.

The newly released paper (which hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet) suggests another option. What if the small force acting on ‘Oumuamua is not from gas release? The study suggests that ‘Oumuamua could have an odd orbit because it’s an alien space probe with a solar sail. A solar sail is a concept for a low-power propulsion system currently in testing at a number of companies and space agencies around the world. The sail would use the pressure of the solar radiation to propel a craft forward continuously. Over time, a solar sail could reach high speeds, possibly even leaving the solar system.

The researcher making this proposal are not presenting evidence that ‘Oumuamua actually has a solar sail — there’s no way to know that with current technology. Instead, they seek to demonstrate that it is possible based on what we know of the physics of solar sails and the orbit of ‘Oumuamua. The study concludes that it’s possible that ‘Oumuamua is being dragged along by a solar sail, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an active alien probe.

Researchers scanned ‘Oumuamua back in 2017 to look for any electromagnetic emissions, finding nothing. At that point, they deemed it not an alien ship. The new study suggests ‘Oumuamua could be non-functional debris with a bit of light sail material clinging on. Alternatively, it could be a probe in a low-power mode that we cannot characterize. Unfortunately, we’ll probably never know for sure what ‘Oumuamua is — it’s already long gone.

An investigation has been launched after several pilots spotted mysterious lights off the south-west coast of Ireland.

The incident happened on November 9 as the pilot from British Airways flight BA94 from Montreal to London, and a Virgin Airlines pilot of VS76 from Orlando to Manchester noticed the objects. Other unidentified pilots also saw the lights.

The pilot from BA94 queried air traffic controllers in Shannon if military exercises were taking place.

AIRLIVEThe Virgin flight was heading to Manchester when a pilot saw the lights.

They said no, and that nothing was showing on the radar."OK. It was moving so fast," said the BA pilot.

She said it came along the left-hand side of the plane before veering rapidly north.

"It was a bright light and then just disappeared at very high speed."

The pilot on VS76, who also witnessed two bright lights, offered a possible explanation.

"Meteor or another object making some kind of re-entry - multiple objects following the same sort of trajectory – very bright from where we were."

Both planes were said to be in high-level airspace - which is an altitude between 28,500ft and 42,000ft.

Airlive reports that the Irish Aviation Authority is "investigated under the normal confidential occurrence investigation process".

It would be obvious from trajectory and speed that it was, my Dad was one of the first Radar Operators and did between 2 and 3 years in the South Pacific during WWII...back in the 60's and 70's when they would say that a radar hit was a weather inversion layer, or some other thing or object he would say that was bullshit because any radar operator who knows what he is doing can tell the difference, his life depended on knowing they were stationed behind enemy lines on an island during the war...

Frank Zappa round table discussion on John Barbour's 'Friday Night Live Talk Show' ThrowbackFrank Zappa in a wonderful round table discussion which includes Paul Krasner..Editor of The Realist..the funniest counterculture news magazine of the 60's and 70's, and Bill Moore, an author and former UFO researcher, prominent from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0o6S-hqTzA

WASHINGTON — The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

In late 2014, a Super Hornet pilot had a near collision with one of the objects, and an official mishap report was filed. Some of the incidents were videotaped, including one taken by a plane’s camera in early 2015 that shows an object zooming over the ocean waves as pilots question what they are watching.

“Wow, what is that, man?” one exclaims. “Look at it fly!”

No one in the Defense Department is saying that the objects were extraterrestrial, and experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents. Lieutenant Graves and four other Navy pilots, who said in interviews with The New York Times that they saw the objects in 2014 and 2015 in training maneuvers from Virginia to Florida off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, make no assertions of their provenance. ...https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings-navy-pilots.html

In the first episode of "The Basement Office", host Steven Greenstreet discusses recent bombshell reports that have thrust UFOs into the mainstream. These include ongoing revelations coming out of the Pentagon regarding "unidentified aerial phenomena", the Navy's encounters with unidentified craft that "defy physics", and commercial air pilots having close encounters. This episode features Nick Pope, the "real-life Fox Mulder", who secretly investigated UFOs for the British government during the 1990s while running the "UFO Office" at the UK's Ministry of Defence. UFOs: “A Threat to the Homeland” | The Basement Office - Ep. 1 |

Episode 2: In 1947, Kenneth Arnold’s UFO sighting and a flying saucer crash in Roswell, New Mexico started a wave. Soon, thousands of eerily similar sightings were being reported across the globe. Nick Pope joins us for this episode of “The Basement Office” to discuss the history of the flying saucer, analyze the most credible reports and discuss how recent UFO sightings have evolved.

In episode 3 of “The Basement Office” the New York Post’s Steven Greenstreet sits down with Nick Pope to discuss the latest UFO sightings and the frightening modern day craft, the black triangle. Is there a Department of Defense cover-up? We speak with witnesses of mass sightings in various locations across the country including the Hudson Valley, New York, and Phoenix, Arizona. Nick reveals why the government downplays such events and offers his take as to whether or not another big wave of UFO sightings is on the horizon.

The New York Post is your source for breaking news, news about New York, sports, business, entertainment, opinion, real estate, culture, fashion, and more.

Washington - Three more U.S. senators received a classified Pentagon briefing on Wednesday about a series of reported encounters by the Navy with unidentified aircraft, according to congressional and government officials — part of a growing number of requests from members of key oversight committees.

One of them was Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose office confirmed the briefing to POLITICO.

'They Can’t Stop All of Us.' Thousands Sign Petition to Invade Area 51 to Find Those Aliens

By Melissa Locker July 12, 2019

If you watch enough science fiction movies (Close Encounters) or TV shows (The X-Files), one thing might become abundantly clear: The government is possibly lying to civilians about aliens. Now, people are taking matters into their own hands.

More than 400,000 people have signed on to a Facebook event pledging to raid Nevada’s Area 51, a site long believed to be a secret alien holding site, on a mission to finally “see them aliens.”

As reported by Newsweek, the event, which was given the name “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us,” suggests that people from around the world gather in the Nevada desert to invade the site, located about 88 miles by road northwest of Las Vegas. The method of invasion that the site suggests is a frenzied “Naruto run”, inspired by Naruto Uzumaki the Japanese manga character who runs with head down and arms stretched behind. “We can move faster than their bullets,” the event page reads.

While there’s a chance that the Area 51 invasion is just all in good fun, because as ComicBook.com notes, it was created by a user best known for posting memes and streaming content on Twitch, the event comes in the wake of some official UFO news. Specifically, that the U.S. Pentagon is launching a new program for the military to report encounters with UFOs and after government-funded investigations into an unidentified aircraft.

To find out if the event is real and the government has been holding back on the existence of alien life, the only way to find out for sure is to show up in the Nevada desert on September 20th. If enough people show up and they make a run for Area 51, perhaps they can finally blow open the doors on the government’s secret alien warehouse and share the findings with the world.

Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was being uncharacteristically unambitious. He once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology is going to be indistinguishable from magic. If you dropped in on a bunch of Paleolithic farmers with your iPhone and a pair of sneakers, you’d undoubtedly seem pretty magical. But the contrast is only middling: The farmers would still recognize you as basically like them, and before long they’d be taking selfies. But what if life has moved so far on that it doesn’t just appear magical, but appears like physics?

After all, if the cosmos holds other life, and if some of that life has evolved beyond our own waypoints of complexity and technology, we should be considering some very extreme possibilities. Today’s futurists and believers in a machine “singularity” predict that life and its technological baggage might end up so beyond our ken that we wouldn’t even realize we were staring at it. That’s quite a claim, yet it would neatly explain why we have yet to see advanced intelligence in the cosmos around us, despite the sheer number of planets it could have arisen on—the so-called Fermi Paradox.

For example, if machines continue to grow exponentially in speed and sophistication, they will one day be able to decode the staggering complexity of the living world, from its atoms and molecules all the way up to entire planetary biomes. Presumably life doesn’t have to be made of atoms and molecules, but could be assembled from any set of building blocks with the requisite complexity. If so, a civilization could then transcribe itself and its entire physical realm into new forms. Indeed, perhaps our universe is one of the new forms into which some other civilization transcribed its world.

These possibilities might seem wholly untestable, because part of the conceit is that sufficiently advanced life will not just be unrecognizable as such, but will blend completely into the fabric of what we’ve thought of as nature. But viewed through the warped bottom of a beer glass, we can pick out a few cosmic phenomena that—at crazy as it sounds—might fit the requirements.

For example, only about 5 percent of the mass-energy of the universe consists of ordinary matter: the protons, neutrons, and electrons that we’re composed of. A much larger 27 percent is thought to be unseen, still mysterious stuff. Astronomical evidence for this dark, gravitating matter is convincing, albeit still not without question. Vast halos of dark matter seem to lurk around galaxies, providing mass that helps hold things together via gravity. On even larger scales, the web-like topography traced by luminous gas and stars also hints at unseen mass.

Cosmologists usually assume that dark matter has no microstructure. They think it consists of subatomic particles that interact only via gravity and the weak nuclear force and therefore slump into tenuous, featureless swathes. They have arguments to support this point of view, but of course we don’t really know for sure. Some astronomers, noting subtle mismatches between observations and models, have suggested that dark matter has a richer inner life. At least some component may comprise particles that interact with one another via long-range forces. It may seem dark to us, but have its own version of light that our eyes cannot see.

In that case, dark matter could contain real complexity, and perhaps it is where all technologically advanced life ends up or where most life has always been. What better way to escape the nasty vagaries of supernova and gamma-ray bursts than to adopt a form that is immune to electromagnetic radiation? Upload your world to the huge amount of real estate on the dark side and be done with it.

If you’re a civilization that has learned how to encode living systems in different substrates, all you need to do is build a normal-matter-to-dark-matter data-transfer system: a dark-matter 3D printer. Perhaps the mismatch of astronomical models and observations is evidence not just of self-interacting dark matter, but of dark matter that is being artificially manipulated.

Or to take this a step further, perhaps the behavior of normal cosmic matter that we attribute to dark matter is brought on by something else altogether: a living state that manipulates luminous matter for its own purposes. Consider that at present we have neither identified the dark-matter particles nor come up with a compelling alternative to our laws of physics that would account for the behavior of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Would an explanation in terms of life be any less plausible than a failure of established laws?

Part of the fabric of the universe is a product of intelligence.

The universe does other funky and unexpected stuff. Notably, it began to expand at an accelerated rate about 5 billion years ago. This acceleration is conventionally chalked up to dark energy. But cosmologists don’t know why the cosmic acceleration began when it did. In fact, one explanation with a modicum of traction is that the timing has to do with life—an anthropic argument. The dark energy didn’t become significant until enough time had gone by for life to take hold on Earth. For many cosmologists, that means our universe must be part of a vast multiverse where the strength of dark energy varies from place to place. We live in one of the places suitable for life like us. Elsewhere, dark energy is stronger and blows the universe apart too quickly for cosmic structures to form and life to take root.

But perhaps there is another reason for the timing coincidence: that dark energy is related to the activities of living things. After all, any very early life in the universe would have already experienced 8 billion years of evolutionary time by the time expansion began to accelerate. It’s a stretch, but maybe there’s something about life itself that affects the cosmos, or maybe those well-evolved denizens decided to tinker with the expansion.

There are even possible motivations for that action. Life absorbs low-entropy energy (such as visible light from the sun), does useful work with that energy, and dumps higher-entropy energy back into the universe as waste heat. But if the surrounding universe ever got too warm—too filled with thermal refuse—things would stagnate. Luckily we live in an expanding and constantly cooling cosmos. What better long-term investment by some hypothetical life 5 billion years ago than to get the universe to cool even faster? To be sure, it may come to rue its decision: Hundreds of billions of years later the accelerating expansion would dilute matter so quickly that civilizations would run out of fresh sources of energy. Also, an accelerating universe does not cool forever, but eventually approaches a floor in temperature.

One idea for the mechanism of an accelerating cosmic expansion is called quintessence, a relative of the Higgs field that permeates the cosmos. Perhaps some clever life 5 billion years ago figured out how to activate that field. How? Beats me, but it’s a thought-provoking idea, and it echoes some of the thinking of cosmologist Freeman Dyson’s famous 1979 paper “Time Without End,” where he looked at life’s ability in the far, far future to act on an astrophysical scale.

Once we start proposing that life could be part of the solution to cosmic mysteries, there’s no end to the fun possibilities. Although dark-matter life is a pretty exotic idea, it’s still conceivable that we might recognize what it is, even capturing it in our labs one day (or being captured by it). We can take a tumble down a different rabbit hole by considering that we don’t recognize advanced life because it forms an integral and unsuspicious part of what we’ve considered to be the natural world.

Life’s desire to avoid trouble points to some options. If it has a choice, life always looks for ways to lower its existential risk. You don’t build your nest on the weakest branch or produce trillions of single-celled clones unless you build in some variation and backup.

Maybe there’s something about life itself that affects the cosmos.

A species can mitigate risk by spreading, decentralizing, and seeding as much real estate as possible. In this context, hyper-advanced life is going to look for ways to get rid of physical locality and to maximize redundancy and flexibility. The quantum realm offers good options. The cosmos is already packed with electromagnetic energy. Today, at any instant, about 400 photons of cosmic microwave radiation are streaming through any cubic centimeter of free space. They collectively have less energy than ordinary particles such as protons and electrons, but vastly outnumber them. That’s a lot of potential data carriers. Furthermore, we could imagine that these photons are cleverly quantum-mechanically entangled to help with error control.

By storing its essential data in photons, life could give itself a distributed backup system. And it could go further, manipulating new photons emitted by stars to dictate how they interact with matter. Fronts of electromagnetic radiation could be reaching across the cosmos to set in motion chains of interstellar or planetary chemistry with exquisite timing, exploiting wave interference and excitation energies in atoms and molecules. The science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem put forward a similar idea, involving neutrinos rather than photons, in the novel His Master’s Voice.

That’s one way that life could disappear into ordinary physics. But even these ideas skirt the most disquieting extrapolations.

Toward the end of Carl Sagan’s 1985 science-fiction novel Contact, the protagonist follows the suggestion of an extraterrestrial to study transcendental numbers. After computing to 1020 places, she finds a clearly artificial message embedded in the digits of this fundamental number. In other words, part of the fabric of the universe is a product of intelligence or is perhaps even life itself.

It’s a great mind-bending twist for a book. Perhaps hyper-advanced life isn’t just external. Perhaps it’s already all around. It is embedded in what we perceive to be physics itself, from the root behavior of particles and fields to the phenomena of complexity and emergence.

In other words, life might not just be in the equations. It might be the equations.

Caleb Scharf is an astrophysicist, the Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University in New York, and a founder of yhousenyc.org, an institute that studies human and machine consciousness. His latest book is The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets and Probabilities.

_________________“Listen to everyone, read everything; believe absolutely nothing unless you can prove it in your own right!”

NASA astronaut Michael Collins who flew the Command Module on Apollo 11 in 1969, has just confirmed his belief in alien life outside of Earth.

The NASA veteran played a critical role in the first manned Moon landing alongside colleagues Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. After retiring from NASA in 1970, the astronaut has been a vocal supporter of establishing a human presence on Mars. Now, astronaut Michael Collins, 88, has opened up about the ultimate question of are we alone in the universe. In an online question and answer session on Twitter, Mr Collins’ 56,600 Twitter followers were given a chance to submit any burning queries they have.

One Twitter follower asked the astronaut if he believes in “life outside of Earth” under the hashtag #AskMichaelCollins.

In a blunt but revealing answer, Mr Collins simply said: “Yes.”

The answer excited a storm of tweets from followers who are similarly convinced extraterrestrial life has evolved on some alien planet far from Earth.

Twitter user Gulshan Kumar said: “Probably… but no evidence…”

Fernando Leon said: “I believe too but there is no evidence to support my belief.”

Angela Byrne said: “Yes, definitely… it would be crazy not to… and very scary.”

And Betty Cozatt said: “Given the literally billions of planets where life might be yes is the only possible answer.

“But has that life evolved into a species that has developed interstellar travel. Probably but no definitive answer yet.”

However, the next big question is whether life outside of Earth has developed enough to form intelligent civilisations.

NASA’s scientists believe the planet Mars may hold evidence of past microbial life but not developed species.

In other cosmic queries, regarding his time in space, Mr Collins was asked about eating bacon in space, his favourite moments from Apollo 11 and why he grew a moustache during the Moon landing.

In regards to enjoying the bacon, the astronaut said: “No. Bacon should not be cubed!”

Mr Collins is a former American test pilot who served in the United States Air Force before joining NASA.

As a test pilot, Mr Collins has logged more than 4,200 hours in flight.

Through is work in the US Air Force, Mr Collins retired with the rank of major general.

_________________“Listen to everyone, read everything; believe absolutely nothing unless you can prove it in your own right!”

In December 2017 and March 2018, The New York Times released three allegedly declassified videos showing U.S. Navy pilots trailing some unidentified flying objects. The mystery crafts moved at hypersonic speeds, flying tens of thousands of feet above the Earth with no distinct wings, engines or visible signs of propulsion whatsoever. Were they flying saucers? Incredibly high-tech drones? The pilots had no idea — and, according to a recent statement from Navy intelligence officials, neither does the U.S. government.

In a statement delivered to the intelligence news website The Black Vault, Joseph Gradisher, a spokesperson for the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Warfare, announced that the Navy officially considers the craft in these three videos "unidentified aerial phenomena." That means that the eerie videos are authentic — and that the objects, which were detected in restricted military training airspaces in 2004 and 2015, were not supposed to be there. The objects still have not been successfully identified as any known type of aircraft.

The UFO footage was also never cleared for public release, Gradisher told The Black Vault — meaning these are three unidentified phenomena you were never supposed to know about.

According to The Black Vault, the videos may have been improperly released by a former Pentagon employee who had applied for permission to share them across several government agencies as part of a database on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) he was allegedly compiling. The man received permission to share the videos for "[US Government] Use Only," paperwork obtained by The Black Vault shows. However, Navy officials never declassified the footage for public release, Gradisher said.

What was the Navy trying to withhold, specifically? Only some very bizarre aerial acrobatics. In one incident filmed in 2004, for example, the unidentified objects "appeared suddenly at 80,000 feet, and then hurtled toward the sea, eventually stopping at 20,000 feet and hovering," The New York Times wrote. "Then they either dropped out of radar range or shot straight back up."

To be clear, nobody is saying that these mystery aircraft have anything to do with alien visitors; they simply can't be identified or explained by current aeronautical knowledge. Comforted? Good — because this sort of thing probably happens way more often than we know.

_________________“Listen to everyone, read everything; believe absolutely nothing unless you can prove it in your own right!”

The UFO seekers flocking to a remote Thai hilltop in search of Buddhist aliensRichard S. Ehrlich, CNN • Published 5th October 2019

Nakhon Sawan (CNN) — A hilltop in central Thailand is attracting UFO seekers who believe extraterrestrials hover above a huge Buddha statue, send telepathic communiques, walk across nearby sugarcane fields and use a crocodile-infested lake as a portal from their planets -- Pluto and Loku.

Though it may sound like science fiction, a small group of individuals claims messages from aliens arriving in spaceships include plenty of traditional religious teachings too -- leading them to believe they are actually Buddhist.

It's all happening three hours by road or rail north from Bangkok in Nakhon Sawan -- which translates to "City of Heaven."Without all the UFO hype, it's just a laid-back small town. But followers believe that if you meditate on Khao Kala hill, outside of Nakhon Sawan, you could hear the talkative silver creatures as voices in your head, speaking whatever language your thoughts usually chatter.

They do offer a disclaimer, saying there is no guarantee you will see UFOs or aliens, which are described as unpredictable, speaking or appearing spontaneously and disappearing after a few hours.

Government attempts to ban gatherings

The group's activities have gotten them into trouble with Thai authorities in recent weeks.Government officials reportedly grew alarmed when UFO seekers began crowding onto Khao Kala hill to see and talk with aliens, possibly endangering the area's official "protected forest area" status.Visitors are allowed to climb to the top of the hill and view the large Buddha statue and nearby "Buddha footprint," which are places of public worship. But the law forbids anyone from living or staying overnight in such zones, including previous UFO seekers who pitched tents at the site.In August, about 40 officials, including members of the Forestry Department, disbanded a group of Thai enthusiasts at the top of Khao Kala, and petitioned a court to ban mass gatherings there.

On September 20, about 30 police and forestry officials confronted Wassana Chuensamnaun, lead campaigner for the extraterrestrials, and about 60 other UFO enthusiasts.

The group, wearing white clothing, planned to have a video made while members "meditated" atop the hill after sunset in hopes of mind-melding with aliens, Wassana tells CNN Travel.

Not wanting to be arrested, the UFO followers regrouped at the bottom of the hill on private property, meditated for a few hours and departed, she says.

"When the UFO spun me, I didn't feel dizzy at all"

As for the origins of the hill's supposed attractiveness to extraterrestrials, believers say it all began in 1997, when retired Sergeant-Major Cherd Chuensamnaun, deep in Buddhist meditation at home, received mental messages from what he insisted were aliens.He told his family. They scoffed.

"I asked my father to tell the aliens to show themselves," says Wassana, his daughter.

"The next day, the aliens sent energy to spin my brother and brother-in-law."

She says the two men were yanked up from the living room sofa and spun simultaneously, like whirling dervishes, out of the house and into the yard."I felt like my legs and my arms had to spin," adds Wassana's brother-in-law Jaroen Raepeth.

"I could not control myself for four or five minutes. I didn't feel afraid. We both spun outside."

Through an upstairs window, Wassana's sister-in-law says she saw a UFO.

"It was about 10 or 15 meters long, at treetop level," adds Wassana.

Asked to re-enact his spinning, Jaroen twirls slowly around the living room with his arms out, but soon falls down and stays on the floor, looking dazed."I feel dizzy. But when the UFO spun me, I didn't feel dizzy at all."

Wassana, who quit her job as a nurse to champion the extraterrestrial, says her father continued to receive telepathic messages over the years."Before my father died [in 2000], he taught us how to communicate with the aliens," she adds.

Today, she says more than 100 other Thais have this ability after practicing with her. Followers post updates and photos at the family's-linked UFOKaoKala Facebook group and elsewhere, some insisting they too have seen aliens and spaceships in the area.

Silvery spaceships filled with silvery humanoids

Most alien encounters are reported near the family's home, on the outskirts of Nakhon Sawan at Khao Kala hill amid sugarcane fields and Bueng Boraphet Lake, which villagers warn is crocodile infested.

The aliens are described as slender, little, silvery humanoids.Illustrations depict them standing upright on two legs with two arms and a bulbous bald head with a pointy face topped with a single antenna. Huge, glossy, almond-shaped black eyes gaze above a thin nose and miniature mouth.

"There are two types of aliens," Wassana says. "One group is from the planet Pluto. The others are from a planet named Loku.

"Pluto aliens are made of energy, can appear in physical form and are able to teach humans. Loku aliens have a physical body and knowledge of high technology. They work together.

"Pluto aliens worry about something so devastating happening on Earth, such as war or in the environment, that it might impact their planet. They also want to give some people the ability to communicate with them, so if humans destroy everything in a nuclear war, the aliens will be able to help survivors rebuild human civilization."

The planet Loku "is in the Milky Way, but they didn't tell us where."

The aliens' purported choice of Khao Kala is unusual because it is the smallest among a cluster of loftier hills. Meditators say they are thankful they don't have to climb very high to reach the top.

Up there, a larger-than-life statue portrays Buddha protected by a mythical seven-headed "naga" snake, which has topped the hill for many years and was not associated with any UFOs before the family's tales.

A 360-degree view from the hill includes flat sugarcane fields below, where Wassana and other believers say they have seen aliens disembark a UFO, walk around and then vanish in an atomized puff.

"I've lived 10,000 years," Pluto's alien leader revealed in communiqués purportedly channeled through Wassana during 1998 and 1999."How long does it take for me to travel from Pluto to here? I travel through dimensions. It's advanced physics. I travel with my mind."

'Embrace the cosmic laws'

Wassana says Pluto's alien leader also told her that Buddha was "the greatest human mind," and "never spoke to humans about paying attention to extraterrestrials, or about trying to communicate with them," but did tell followers "to embrace the cosmic laws."

Mind-melding communiqués from Pluto to Wassana include lots of advice about "karma," "reincarnation," "greed," "fear" and other Buddhist concerns, she says, as well as the altruistic thought-bubble that you shouldn't worry about Earth's Apocalypse from nuclear war, climate change, mutant diseases or other "catastrophes."

That's good news in this Southeast Asian country where 95% of the population is Buddhist.

It may also give followers legal and social protection if their UFO group gets too popular. Thai authorities and society frown on anything they perceive as a cult that veers too far from traditional religious beliefs and becomes influential.

Buddhism is open to the possibility of extraterrestrials, ghosts, spirits and other non-human life, but warns against being sucked into an invisible cul-de-sac of absurd illusions.

When asked about Thais seeing UFOs and communicating with aliens, Buddhist scholar Veeranut Rojanaprapa, who has a PhD in philosophy and religion from St. John's University in Bangkok, tells CNN Travel: "We don't need to know if it is real or not, if it's a fake story or it's reality. Buddha taught us that maybe the one who says that he thinks he can directly speak with the alien, or he believes, he hears them.

"But it is not useful. It doesn't matter if he hears the alien or not. It does not help us for [experiencing] nirvana," says Veeranut. "We do not say if it is right or wrong if the human can speak to the alien. But please listen carefully: most of the situations are only illusion."

Nevertheless, Bangkok-based Ploy Buranasiri has been visiting Khao Kala for nine years and says she's seen aliens and UFOs there several times.Asked what she would like to say to the aliens, says: "I would like ask for a relocation to their planet."

Sukwasa Mukprom, 32, visited Khao Kala more than 10 times during the past year."I want the aliens to send me the power to make me brave," she says.

_________________“Listen to everyone, read everything; believe absolutely nothing unless you can prove it in your own right!”

Entomologist William Romoser gave a presentation this week in which he claimed NASA photos show evidence of creatures, some still living, on the red planet.

Romoser has worked as a professor of entomology at Ohio University for four decades.

It's likely that the real phenomenon in Romoser's work is pareidolia — the tendency to "see" recognizable shapes among random visual data.

Photos captured by NASA's Mars rovers reveal the greatest scientific discovery of all time: proof of alien life.

Or, you know, proof of alien rocks. You be the judge.

Entomologist William Romoser gave a poster presentation on Tuesday, November 19, at the national meeting of the Entomological Society of America in St. Louis, Missouri. He claimed that his analysis of NASA images demonstrates convincing evidence that life exists on Mars, including insect- and reptile-like creatures, some of which still live there today."There has been and still is life on Mars," Romoser said. "There is apparent diversity among the Martian insect-like fauna which display many features similar to Terran insects that are interpreted as advanced groups — for example, the presence of wings, wing flexion, agile gliding/flight, and variously structured leg elements."

"Once a clear image of a given form was identified and described, it was useful in facilitating recognition of other less clear, but none-the-less valid, images of the same basic form," Romoser said.

To analyze the photos, Romoser played with factors like saturation, brightness and contrast, but he didn't add or remove any content from the photos, according to a press release from Ohio University.

(NASA/JPL; William Romoser/Ohio University)

"An exoskeleton and jointed appendages are sufficient to establish identification as an arthropod. Three body regions, a single pair of antennae, and six legs are traditionally sufficient to establish identification as 'insect' on Earth. These characteristics should likewise be valid to identify an organism on Mars as insect-like. On these bases, arthropodan, insect-like forms can be seen in the Mars rover photos."

Romoser said some of the creatures he saw in the images resemble carpenter bees and snakes. It's a bold and probably false claim. It's also not the first time Romoser has reported "evidence" of life on Mars. In 2017 and 2018, he published two reports describing "unidentified aerial phenomena" on the red planet. As Amanda Kooser wrote for CNET, the more likely phenomenon driving Romoser's findings is pareidolia, which is our tendency to "see" recognizable shapes in just about anything, from pancakes, to the flames of the Notre Dame fire, to photos from the Mars rovers.

Back on Earth, Romoser has spent 45 years as an entomology professor at Ohio University, where he co-founded the Tropical Disease Institute. He also worked as a researcher for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and has authored and co-authored four editions of the widely-used textbook, "The Science of Entomology."

(NASA/JPL; William Romoser/Ohio University)

At the very least, Romoser said this week, his findings suggest scientists should keep looking for life on Mars.

"The evidence of life on Mars presented here provides a strong basis for many additional important biological as well as social and political questions," he added. "It also represents a solid justification for further study."

Next year, the Mars 2020 rover plans to do just that, only its main focus will be searching for past microbial life.

_________________“Listen to everyone, read everything; believe absolutely nothing unless you can prove it in your own right!”

The US Department of Defense has released three declassified videos of "unexplained aerial phenomena".

The Pentagon said it wanted to "clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real".

The videos had already been leaked in 2007 and 2017.

Two were published by the New York Times, while the third was leaked by an organisation co-founded by former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge.

After they were first leaked, some people claimed the videos showed alien unidentified flying objects (UFOs).What's in the videos?

According to the New York Times, a clip from 2004 was filmed by two navy fighter pilots and shows a round object hovering above the water, about 100 miles (160 km) out into the Pacific Ocean.

Two other videos filmed in 2015 show objects moving through the air, one of which is spinning. In one, a pilot is heard saying: "Look at that thing, dude! It's rotating!"

In its statement, the Pentagon said: "After a thorough review, the department has determined that the authorised release of these unclassified videos does not reveal any sensitive capabilities or systems, and does not impinge on any subsequent investigations of military air space incursions by unidentified aerial phenomena.

"DOD [Department of Defense] is releasing the videos in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos. The aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as 'unidentified'."

The fascination with the unexplained never goes away. And the UFO phenomenon is perhaps one of the most potent of these stories, linking uncertainty about worlds beyond our own to conspiracy theories about government and especially the US government.

Down the centuries people have looked to the sky and tried to explain mysterious lights and objects. But the modern UFO story took root in 1947 when a farmer discovered debris at Roswell, New Mexico, initially described as a flying disc, but now thought to be part of a secretive balloon programme to monitor the Soviet Union.

Subsequently the testing base for advanced aircraft, known as Area 51 in Nevada, became the alleged centre for UFO research. For the conspiracy theorists this was where the US government sought to harness advanced alien technology.

Over the years many of the most outlandish theories have been debunked. But in 2017, the Pentagon did finally admit that it had a long-standing programme, now terminated, investigating alleged UFOs.

Today, the US Navy prefers to call these unexplained sightings "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena". But that's not going to supplant an acronym which has entered into our collective sub-conscious, prompting that fundamental question: are we really alone in the universe?

Tweeting about the release, DeLonge thanked shareholders in his organisation, To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, and said he was hoping to fund further research into the objects.

"With today's events and articles on my and @TTSAcademy's efforts to get the US Gov to start the grand conversation, I want to thank every share holder at To The Stars for believing in us," he said.

"Next, we plan on pursuing the technology, finding more answers and telling the stories."

The musician co-founded the academy in 2017 in order to study UFOs and other paranormal phenomena.

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